INTAR Announces The Cast For LUCY LOVES ME

INTAR (Lou Moreno, Artistic Director/John McCormack, Executive Director) today announced the cast for the first of the two plays for its Winter/Spring 2013 season: Lucy Loves Me, written by Migdalia Cruz, directed by Lou Moreno, will star Annie Henk, Bertha Leal, and Gerardo Rodriguez.

Lucy Loves Me was developed as part of INTAR's legendary Maria Irene Fornés Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory (MIF HPRL). Migdalia Cruz's coming of age story, Lucy Loves Me, will kick off INTAR's 2013 season. Lucy dreams of not having to deliver pizza, Cookie dreams of a cabaret career, and Milton dreams of bleeding. Lucy delivers a pizza to Milton. Milton randomly calls Cookie. And when Cookie invites him over, Lucy answers the door. Is this a recipe for love?

Migdalia Cruz was trained by Fornés at INTAR between 1984 and 1991. Cruz credits Fornés for inspiring her to write Lucy Loves Me. "Irene gave us an exercise in class where we were to remember a song that we associated with a memory of water," says Cruz, "and Only Tell Me - a dark piece by Béla Bartók in a deadly minor key - was the song I not only recalled, but re-lived as I sang it in my mind. Somehow that song came to symbolize all that was horrible and awkward - danger, poverty, trapped by circumstance, and a yearning for love. That's when the character Lucy was born. "In 1981 Maria Irene Fornés, the master dramatist/director and influential teacher launched the HPRL at INTAR to develop the work of Latino theater artists and to examine Hispanic American cultural heritage. Many of the students Fornés trained -- including Migdalia Cruz, Cherrie Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Nilo Cruz and Caridad Svich -- became the most widely produced Latino/a playwrights in the US, prompting recognition of Fornés as the inspiration of a generation of new voices in the American theater.

Fornés led the HPRL until 1994. In 2011, the lab was renamed in her honor. Today the MIF HPRL continues to focus on developing its participants' playwriting skills, building resources to further their pursuit of playwriting, and providing an integrated support for theater artists participating in HPRL along with INTAR's Actors' Collective and Main Stage production series. Caridad Svich is the current director of the lab.

Bertha Leal is making her Off-Broadway debut. Off-Off-Broadway she has been seen in Knee Deep In Snow and Augustine's Confessions. Her regional credits include Oleanna (Pinecrest Theatre Rep), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (ALLIANCE THEATRE Lab), Katharine Hepburn: The Best Man for the Job; References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot (Unhinged Theatre Company), El Cepillo de Dientes (AlterNative Theatre Festival), Pericles (Wertheim Performing Arts Center), Sunday on the Rocks (Distinguished Monkey Company). She would like to dedicate this performance to the love of her life, her mom. www.berthaleal.com

Lou Moreno directed Drawn and Quartered by Maggie Bofill, which was developed in INTAR's NewWorks Lab, and was INTAR's inaugural production under his leadership. Other directing credits include Trying by Erin Browne (The Bushwick Starr); Minotaur a Romance and Beautiful by David Anzuelo (LAByrinth Theater Company at The Public Theater); MCC Youth Festival (Manhattan Class Company); Kingdom (NYMF); End of the Line (MCC Youth Company); Rock/Paper/Scissors (NY Hip-Hop Theater Festival at The Public Theater); The Bigger Man (Partial Comfort); and Blues for a Gray Sun by Nilaja Sun (INTAR). He also serves as an Associate Producer with The 24-Hour Company (Athens, Greece and Broadway). Moreno won the 2005 Princess Grace Award for Directing.

Migdalia Cruz, born and raised in the Bronx, is an award-winning playwright of more than fifty plays, operas, screenplays, and musicals including Fur, Miriam's Flowers, Frida, Dreams of Home, Cigarettes & Moby-Dick, El Grito Del Bronx, and Another Part of the House, produced in venues as diverse as National Theater of Greece/Athens, Old Red Lion/London, Houston Grand Opera, Classic Stage Company, AteneoPuertorriqueño, San Francisco's campoSanto and Latino Chicago Theater Company where she was writer-in-residence.Her plays produced at INTAR include Not Time's Fool, Welcome Back to Salamanca, The Have-Little, & Miriam's Flowers. She also translated three plays by Mexican playwrights through the Lark's Mexico/US Word Exchange. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and was mentored by Maria Irene Fornés at INTAR. TWO ROBERTS: a Pirate-Blues Project commissioned by the Lark with a NYSCA grant received a studio workshop last year. She is currently at work on Satyricoño at INTAR and an annotated translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Her latest collection of plays published by NoPassport Press, entitled El Grito DelBronx, features: El Grito Del Bronx, Yellow Eyes, Salt, and Da Bronx Rocks-a part of "Song For New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting" presented by Mabou Mines.